Shownotes
A booktip when you really want to get serious about letting your habits work for you:
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Hey there! This is Priyesh Ramman, the host of the, Your Trainee Program Podcast. And I would like to personally welcome you to this episode of the, your trainee program podcast. If you haven’t subscribed yet make sure to subscribe for the podcast and visit www.yourtraineeprogram.com and receive the free, effective conversations, cheat sheet, which will help you manage your conversations and we’ll help you get the best out of your conversations. So today, what are we going to talk about today? I wanna talk about habits. And why is that? Because I think that changing your habits will make you a more effective efficient person and will help you reach your goals even faster. And the reason why I’m creating this episode today about habits is because lately I hear a lot of people are giving well-meant advice to others about just doing stuff.
And while that’s completely true, if you want to reach your goals and you want to make steps, you just have to do stuff. It’s not quite that easy for a lot of people. And it is because, ‘’just’’ is something which lives in your world. It’s probably advice which worked for you, but that doesn’t mean that the person on the other end of the advice is also facing the same problems. And in this episode, I want to look at why people are not getting stuff done. And I want to give you some tips about how you’re going to get stuff done on and how you’re going to reach your goals faster!
THE IMPORTANCE OF HABITS!
So why do I think habits are important? Well, that is because I believe that you can only change your behavior if you’ve noticed your behavior before. So if you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re not aware of your behavior, it will be really hard changing your behavior. So make sure you listen to this entire episode as I’m going to provide you with my two best tips about changing your habits and becoming a more efficient, effective person.
WHAT ARE HABITS?
So what are habits actually? If we look at a quick internet definition, we see that a habit is a routine or behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. What does this actually mean? Clearly the focus is on repeated regularly and subconsciously. It’s something which you do more than once a day or might be doing all day. So you do this regularly and it’s in your subconscious, which means that you’re not always giving it a thought. It’s just an automatic behavior. I call it automatic behavior.
Have you ever heard some say; ‘Well, this is just the way i am’
Priyesh Ramman
or maybe you say it yourself. I can hear myself saying this in the past. And even till the day of today when I’m faced with something I haven’t done before I probably think this is just who I am. This is just what I know. And that for me is a trigger to think, hey, what is happening? Why am I thinking this? And why am I saying this? So, where I want to get at, is that if you can manage to change your habits, you can change your behavior. And you can build a more efficient, effective version of yourself.
HOW HABITS CAN CHANGE YOUR WORLD
Before I dive in my best tips to manage your habits. I first want to tell you a short story about me and my coworker last week. And I want to show you the power of getting track of your habits. So this was with a coworker of mine. She is also a manager and this week she turned to me and she said, ‘’well, Priyesh you know lately I don’t have a lot of time to focus on my own work. I’m really engaging in micromanagement. My people are asking a lot of me’’ and she’s a really good manager so she always listens to her people. And that is a really good thing. The downside of the story is that she doesn’t have enough time to finish her own stuff. She doesn’t have the time to read reports, to write reports and to come with efficient solutions to make the workplace a better environment for everybody. So that is quite a problem.
At the same time she also said, ‘’well Priyesh, I think I have a solution for this problem’’. And I asked her curiously, what are you going to do? And she answered, ‘’well, what I’m going to do is make an agreement with my people. I’m going to ask them not to bother me and to leave me alone for some time so that I can finish my projects’’. And while that seems quite simple, I asked her a follow up question, how are you going to dig into people’s head and going to make a difference when it’s really important and when it’s not? Because I can imagine if they’re coming to you, they don’t know the answer. And for them, it’s a real important question. And she looked at me and she said, well, that’s an interesting question. I haven’t thought about that earlier.
Also I know her quite a while now, so I asked her the following question. ‘’Do you think that if people are going to ask you a question about something they don’t know, you will be able to not answer them?’’ She looked at me, she said nothing for a couple of seconds. And she said, ‘’well, actually, no’’. And she was affirming in my thoughts because she’s a really kind person. And she also likes to help people always. And I don’t think she’s going to reject people when they have something on their mind, which is obviously a good thing.
And it’s really okay because she knows herself quite well. And if I look at myself, this could also be me, that I can’t say no to people. But as people we usually want to put ourselves in impossible situations. If I know that I’m not able to say no to other people I can think about saying no, but it’s probably not going to happen because it doesn’t match with who I am as a person.
So if we go back to the conversation which I had with my colleague, I asked her ‘’are there other ways where you can do what you want’’? So do your tasks and just be yourself as a person and not having these expectations of yourself, what you will probably not meet. And we had a really long discussion there about her habits. And the funny thing is that she came with the solution on herself. She said, ‘’well, you’re, probably right. I’m not going to say no to people because that’s just not who I am’’, which is really okay. And I have to think about something else and what we did there was dig deeper into her habits. And I asked her what’s the most important thing in the morning, which doesn’t allow you to do your stuff?
And again, she answered ‘’that are the people who are asking me questions’’. And I went to her morning routine. So I asked her, ‘’what does it looks like when you enter the office in the morning’’? So she started describing her morning. She came in, she went to get some coffee. She goes to her desk. She greets her colleagues. She talks with her colleagues and she goes behind her desk and she starts to work. And there is where it starts, people are going to ask her questions. Sometimes she can work for 10 minutes, for 50 minutes. And people are going to ask her questions again. So she gets interrupted and I ask her, ‘’okay, if that is your morning routine, just on a micro level, what can you change’’? And I’m not talking about the coffee because that’s a really healthy behavior in the morning if I look at myself.
But I asked her, ‘’what can you change about this?’’ So people are not going to ask you questions. They’re not going to disturb you. And this was a real difficult question for her because this was her morning routine for more than 10 years. So I didn’t expect that it was going to change all of a sudden. And she said, ‘’well, actually, that’s where the problem lies.’’ When I come in, people are going to start asking questions. So I asked ‘’what if you stop coming in’’? And she looked at me really strange, like, are you out of your mind? I’m doing this job for more than 10 years, I’m coming to the office more than 10 years. What actually do you mean with not coming in? So I clarified and I said, ‘’what if you’re not going to your workplace right away in the morning?’’
What if you go to another desk or another floor maybe for like half a day or whatever? So you can log into your computer and you can start doing some stuff. First, she looked at me quite doubtfull and she answered, well, I’m not sure if I can do that, because I’m doing this for more than 10 years now, and I’m not sure how that works, but it seems logical. And what we did there is look deeper into her habits. It’s completely normal that she comes in and gets her coffee. It’s completely normal for her to go to her desk, log in, have some small talk with her colleagues and then just go to work. These are habits, which she doesn’t think about anymore. Probably since the day she worked there. Some times this was new behavior for her because she haven’t worked here since her birth.
At some day she came here. People told her to sit somewhere and she just did that. Or maybe she chose for it herself. I don’t know that. But she’s not giving it a lot of thought now. So what we did there, is look at her behavior and ask some questions about if you want to reach a certain goal in this example get your work done, are your patterns, your daily patterns in line or aligned with your habits? And again, the reason why I’m saying this is because we can have a lot of expectations from ourself. Some will probably come true, but some will probably not true or will be really difficult for us to achieve. There are easier ways, and that’s my number one tip, look into your behavior.
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOR?
You only can change your behavior if you know what it is. And that is going to start by mapping out your habits. And this can be really easy. It sounds really big, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It can be in some sheet where you have three columns, for example the situation, your behavior and the trigger. The situation is what is happening around you. And it’s external. Your behavior is the way you react on a specific situation. Like in the example, she comes in and people start to talk to her or asking about her weekend. Her behavior is to talk back and to engage in some endless small talk, which is also quite normal. And if you go further into this, you can look for the trigger.
Why is she engaging in endless small talk? Because she likes her people and she wants to take care of them. And she wants to engage in small talk with her people. That’s just normal behavior. If you have the triggers, you can change your situation and your behavior or elsewise. Sometimes it’s easier to change your situation than to change your behavior. This is not always the fact, because at some point you will have to adjust your behavior, to become a better version of yourself. But a lot of times changing your situation is way more effective. And that’s my number two tip. Don’t always make it hard on yourself to change your behavior, look for your patterns. Look what is going on and try to change the situation.
In this example, we could have changed the fact that she’s engaging in small talk or we can focus on her saying no to her colleagues or making endless agreements with her colleagues so that they won’t disturb her while she is working. But this is really hard. She has to say no to other people, but she’s also not in control about when other people are going to talk to her. So if this is the situation, what can we do best change? Try to change her behavior and the behavior of her colleagues, or just change the situation. So what happened next is that we had this conversation about how we can change the situation. And also this one wasn’t quite easy because like I said, she was doing this for 10 years.
She was really familiar with her environment, with her colleagues, with her desk, with her computer. But in our company, we can go and work everywhere. We can log in on every computer and we can do our work. So I asked her the following, what are you going to do next, now that we know that you will have a hard time changing your behavior, what are we going to do? And she answered, I’m just going to sit somewhere else and I’m going to try this. And I’m going to see which results it will bring me. So I said to her, okay, and how are you going to do it? And when will you start? Because I can imagine that if this is your behavior pattern or your habit for like more than 10 years, it will be really hard to start with it.
So how are you going to do it? And that was really funny because I saw that she was getting a little nervous, only the thought of sitting somewhere else was new to her, so she had to adjust. And I asked her, I understand this will not be easy for you because you are asking something from yourself which you haven’t done before. Why don’t we start small and like with everything, if you just start with small simple actions, you can probably break your habits more easily. So I asked her what if we start tomorrow with sitting at another desk for like one hour, is that possible? She was still a little nervous, but she answered, yes, I’m going to do that because I see the benefits of it. And I want to try it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but I have to at least try it.
And what happened the next day was really genius because she came to me and she said, well I started the day a little bit different than the other days, because I sat somewhere else. And you won’t believe what I finished today. We discussed some plan earlier that week. And she finished the entire plan. She read it, she rewrote it and she was really glad with her results.
And I think it works this way with a lot of people. I also have my own experiences with mapping out my habits and looking for and seeing, or being confronted with stuff which wasn’t in my conscious mind, but again, by having a journal and mapping out different situations and my behavior on those situations, I also learn a lot about myself and my behavior. And sometimes it’s obvious, but sometimes it’s also I’m seeing stuff which I didn’t knew before. So they are valuable insights for me. And I think everybody can start doing this right away.
SUMMARY
So just to recap real fast for you, number one, get track of your habits, and this can be done very easily by having a journal with just three columns and some spreadsheet. And mapping examples from your daily life, like one or two moments a day, write them in your journal and look back at them after one week or after one month and just see the patterns. Probably we will see stuff in some red line and look at those behaviors and look at what you can change there. You can change your behavior, you can change the situation, but just be aware about what you are doing.
And next don’t always assume that you have to change your behavior. A lot of times you will have in your behavior, you have to adjust to the people around you, but also take note of the situation. If you can change the situation, which will get you more results, it’s most of the times more easy, and it will get you better results.
So for today, that was it actually. I would like to thank you for listening to this episode of the, your trainee program podcast. And I would like to hear your thoughts about changing your habits or getting more effective and how you manage to achieve your results. So leave them in the comments. You can also send me a message. That was it for today, and don’t forget to subscribe for the, your trainee program podcast. Thank you very much.
Priyesh